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[German Version] Pulpit rights are part of the authority granted with appointment to preach the gospel, administer the sacraments, and provide pastoral care for a congregation. This authorization is thus a derivative of parish law. It gives the incumbent the exclusive right to preach from the pulpit of the parish church and – because he or she is responsible for scriptural and orthodox…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies – II. Christianity – III. Judaism – IV. Buddhism – V. Islam I. Religious Studies 1. Overview. Mission is not a fundamentally universal phenomenon in the history of religions; neither is every form in which religion is passed on eo ipso mission. “Primary,” tribal religions are not missionary religions. Their domain is coterminous with their society and its way of life; they are handed down from one generation to the next in the course of natural life. The question of truth does not arise. An indivi…

[German Version] Together with old-age pension and survivors’ benefits, the ministerial stipend is the heart of the adequate livelihood the churches owe their clergy, who can then devote …

[German Version] I. Catholicism – II. Orthodoxy – III. Protestantism The term parish comes from the Greek παροικία/ paroikía (“resident alien’s dwelling”), which in early Christianity expressed the foreignness of Christians in society. Resulting from this basic feeling, individual congregations were called παροικίαι/ paroikíai from the 2nd century. Until Late Antiquity, paroikía remained a technical term for a bishop’s congregation. Only after the rise of pastoral subcenters in large towns and rural areas, which became the main point of reference for ¶ believers’ religious li…

[German Version] An “immediate parish” (Ger. Immediatgemeinde) is a congregation outside the geographical parochial (Parish/diocese) structure that reports directly to the governing body of the church (Church governance) – formerly mostly palace and court congregations, since abolished, today only the cathedral parish in Berlin. Two factors make it unique: Protestants living anywhere in Berlin can be enrolled as members, and, despite its geographical association with the Evangelische Kirche in Berlin-…

[German Version] Today the church registration system in Germany has its legal basis in the federal civil registration law and the supplemental registration laws of the several Länder. Originally it served only the interests of the security police, making sure that the state could reach any citizen at any time; as the modern social state developed, it became primarily a tool for collecting and recording general personal information. As in the case of the civil registration system, the constitutional right of negative free…

[German Version] I. Catholic Main Churches – II. Protestant Main Churches (Evangelical Church in Germany) …

[German Version] Land holdings as part of the property of the church can be traced back to the dotations of the Carolingian period. According to the Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae (775-790), every newly erected church was to be endowed with two hides of land (= 7.6 hectacres); in the 819 ecclesiastical capitulary of Louis the Pious, the dotations were augmented by one so-called imperial hide. The lands were intended to serve the needs of the local church, i.e. its worship and maintenance (church lands) as well as to suppo…